Friday, August 11, 2006

I just learned that the word "gullible" isn't in the Microsoft dictionary

Here's testimony from a Lebanese Christian that is worth remembering today:

"I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

"When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

"It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon....

"I knew for fact that, if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds, as shouts of joy of Allah Akbar, God is great, would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets."

This is some serious lying flat-out racist tripe this woman is spewing. Flat-out horrifically racist. And clearly full of shit. How do we know she's full of shit? Go to her Web site and one of the first things you read is:

I am a victim of the Lebanese civil war, which was the first front in the worldwide Jihad of militant Islam against the only Christian country in the Middle East.

I may not know much about the intricacies of the Lebanese Civil War, but I do know that my BS detector went haywire when she had the nerve to call Lebanon "the only Christian country in the Middle East." Umm, no. It's a country with the highest percentage of Christians, but that percentage is below 50%, as it was back in 1975. It was RULED by Christians back then, but that's not the same thing.

And also, she said she was taught in Lebanon that all Jews were bad and Israel must be driven to the sea. But who in the world "taught" her this? The Christian government she grew up with? Her Christian parents? Someone in the bomb shelter she lived in for 7 years? Some government official in charge of a failed state in the middle of a civil war?

Andy, however, prefers not to question any of the motivations of our young heroine. Instead, he uses it as a platform to spew some halfwitted tripe about how Israel is "in a different category of morality" from her enemies. The most amazing, completely unironic part, is when he says:

[O]ur values are what will win in the long run — because they reflect a deeper truth about human dignity than the poisonous doctrines of distorted religious certitude and bigotry. That's why we must never — never — tolerate torture of prisoners; that's why we should never sacrifice the rule of law; that's why we should never give civilian politicians a "get-out-of-jail-free" card for war crimes. And that's why we should support Israel now, more than ever.

Umm, Andy? Your Lebanese Christian is a bigot. The entire GOP has a distorted religious certitude. Israel has given war criminals free passes. And George Bush is still president, proving that when it comes to tolerating the torture of prisoners, we're right up there with the best of them.

Overblown moral rectitude is easily the stupidest way to proceed in this war of ideas. "Look, could you guys please stop blowing us up? Don't you realize that we're BETTER than you?"